These exterior weathering effects may be endlessly startling, especially in the pinkish light play of dawn and dusk, but quite as memorable is what humankind has since done with the interiors. The soft tufa has been hollowed out to serve as granaries, stables, wineries, refectories, refuges and, most impressively, Byzantine chapels whose exquisite devotional frescoes tell of the region’s deeply rooted Christian heritage.

Of these numerous rock-carved places of worship and monastic living, mostly dating from the eighth to 12th centuries, the most exceptional cluster is to be found at the town of Goreme’s Open Air Museum. In these moving cave interiors, with their rock-carved colonnades and their alluring palettes of ochres, oranges and intense lapis blues, it pays to linger, letting these often touchingly naïve images reveal themselves. Here’s a Nativity, with the additional detail from the Orthodox tradition of Christ taking his first bath, charmingly depicted; and here St George, whom the English have always thought of as their own but who turns out to be a Cappadocian, no less, and tackling what looks less like a dragon than a monstrous snake. 
 
Be sure to walk the valleys, thick with apricots, pistachios and the vines whose excellent product is the region’s earthy red wines. You might even take to the air, that signature Cappadocian experience, in one of the hundreds of balloons which rise over the valleys at dawn.   
 
But this being Cappadocia, you’ll find it hard to stay above ground for long. Here on the great land route between Europe and Asia the troglodytic instinct necessarily runs deep. All across the region have been uncovered so-called ‘underground cities’ – vast warrens of tunnels and chambers sometimes 10 floors deep where populations simply removed themselves from harm’s way as and when the latest lot of invaders – Hittites, Persians, Goths, Saracens, Mongols, Turks – turned up.